Can One (American) Man Defeat Poverty in Africa?
A picture is worth a thousand words. The thousand words inside (CT Oct 2005) about Rick Warren's PEACE plan proclaimed a "tsunami-like paradigm change" in missions.
But the paradigm behind the "thousand word picture" outside the magazine doesn't seem very different from the one that guided 19th Century European missionaries. They thought they had what it would take to design and deliver a "Christian solution" to Africa's problems (it turned out to be more "Western" than "Christian").
With the light on the cover focused on a white man and his wife, we are offered hope that 21st Century American Christians now have what it takes. We are asked to believe that we can use our leadership to fix Africa's poverty by being rich enough, influential enough and by sharing our technology.
Whether the paradigm will work the second time around, I don't know. A truly changed paradigm might propose that true Christian hope for the West, indeed, for the world, depends more on the obedient initiatives of African Christians living at the margins of world influence than on globalizing our unique brand of California Christianity (I include myself, 4th generation Californian).
Medieval Northern Europe was shaped more by God's work among the poor and "pagan" Irish living at the margins of political and ecclesiastical power than by the theological and political influence of wealthy Roman Christianity.
In Africa, God is already shaping and forming a new church, teaching His people there to love the unlovely, raising up the next generation of our world's Christian leaders while making Himself known to millions in the midst of war, tribalism, suffering and poverty.
Let us pray the fruit of God's work there won't be drowned in a Tsunami of our own making!
Rosa Parks died yesterday. Racism broke her heart so God used her to do something about it. What breaks your heart?
I went on a long ride yesterday. I found myself cycling through the Lafayette hills towards Moraga (I live in California by the way). I came upon St. Mary's University and instantly wondered why I chose to go to college in frigid Minnesota when there is this oasis of higher education tucked back in the fog covered hills of the East Bay.
As I continued on my ride, I found myself in the "golden" hills surrounded by splendor and in solitude. It was the most relaxed I had been in six weeks.
And then I got to my coffee shop…read the newspaper…and panic set in.
800,000 people are without homes in the Himalayas and winter is three weeks away!
I just read that the killer of Pamela Vitale is a 16-year-old high school student/turned college student from my neighboring city. I had been keeping up with this case in the news, often asking myself, "What would I do if I came home one day to find my wife dead–murdered–in our house?" I shudder to think what that must have been like for Daniel Horowitz. What's tougher, I can imagine, is not knowing who did it or why it happened.
And then the headlines rolled in this afternoon, speaking of a sixteen-year-old slayer who brutally murded this woman using crown-molding to beat her over thirty times. He then cut a "gothic symbol" into her back, drank a glass of water, took a shower in her home, and left.
Why? The report said that it was because he had been using her credit card number and mailing address to get supplies for a marijuana growing project he was working on. He went up to her home to see if the supplies had come, had some kind of run-in with her, and killed her in her home.
I saw the sequence of pictures of this young bro from when he was an 8th grader, a ninth grader, and a tenth grader. The first two look completely normal–the last one is the scariest picture of a human being I think I've ever seen. It broke my heart.
I spent last night processing this tragedy with students from his high school. Confused, stunned, concerned are just some of the terms that I would use to describe the reactions of his fellow class-mates. Unfortunately, this murder came after three recent suicides in the same school. "How are we supposed to live?" asked one student. "We've become decensitized to death–we just move on." quoted another.
I don't want people to just move on. I want these students to be the first to love the and the first to serve. What would the world look like if students lived the unconventional way. That is, when they see the transformation of a student like Scott Dyleski, they don't rule him out as a freak, but instead line up for a chance to love him.
The death of Pamela Vitale is certainly tragic. But maybe the worse Lafayette Tragedy is that someone forgot to love Scott….
I am confused by the church. The older I get the less I understand what it is and the more I long for it to be what it was created to be. When did the church become so consumed with getting people inside her walls that she forgot that part of her purpose was to love and serve the community that she is surrounded by? When did the church become so preocuppied with the bottom line that she desperately searches for the next best "growth" campaign with the objective of raising more money? How did we get here?
I have heard of a pastor who claims that the local church is the hope of the world. I used to understand that statement. It used to make all kinds of sense to me–make church really fun and entertaining and programmatically well done and people will come and enjoy it. In other words–borrowing from a popular baseball movie–"If we build it, they will come." And for a while, they did! They came in droves attracted to what we could do inside of the church walls. They were fascinated by our ability to use videos and set designs to communicate in a sensitive way. We entertained them with the message of the Gospel, sugar-coating it until it looked and tasted like a lolli-pop.
And then something subtle began to happen. "Christians" were acting more like members of an exclusive spiritual club than following the Way Jesus. The consumerism of 20th and 21st Century American "Christians" began to drive the church and she became more consumed with maintaining the quality of what was happening inside her walls than embracing her community, being the first to serve and the best at loving.
The Church was God's idea. When we pear it down to our idea or our ability–something supernatural is lost and it becomes a fake, feel-good, people driven enterprise. Isn't it confusing that what should be the number-one world changing force in the world has become castrated to insignificance? What is it going to take for the Church to take a progressive step back to what it was supposed to be?
People want to be a part of a movement–they alwasy have and they always will. In today's world, the movement that people want to be a part of is a movement that is making a difference–a movement that is changing the world. That is simply going to call for followers of Jesus to begin living in an unconventional way.
What does unconventional way mean?
It means that instead of focusing on how to be a better church person in all comfort, you focus on what it means to follow Jesus. It means that when people are hungry–you feed them; when people are thristy, you give them something to drink; when they're drowning in the scum waters of the Bayou–you help them to dry land; when their basements are flooded–you be the first to help them get it out. The opportunities go on and on.
There is a big difference between church people and followers of Jesus. People who say that the church is the hope of the world may be in danger of producing church people. People who say that the love and grace and freedom through Jesus are the hopes of the world might be following the real-deal Jesus. They might be the ones seeing fireworks in their community as they love and serve it instead of being "too busy" trying to figure out how to pull fireworks within their church walls.